That Kind of Woman: On Motherhood As a Choice, Not a Destiny

2 weeks ago

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The oldest of my five younger sisters, her first child in the crook of her elbow: I always wanted to be a mother, she says.

Which shocked me—I mean confounded me, the idea of wanting to be a mother. And then, variously, each sister declares she wants a family, children, one even seeking out a husband who she believes will be a “good dad.”

There is a way I can speak that is stentorian, and when I do, I am not present: I never wanted to be a mother. Distinct from: I didn’t want a child.

I did not understand what it felt like to want a child.

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I did not grieve the loss of my pregnancy, but I did grieve the loss of a younger self who had not yet made a momentous decision on her own behalf.

A termination. Loss of innocence?

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Your mother had you at twenty-two and you were older than that.

I did not grieve the loss of my pregnancy, but I did grieve the loss of a younger self who had not yet made a momentous decision on her own behalf.

I didn’t feel ready, it was a shock.

A shock?

Getting pregnant was a shock.

Why weren’t you more careful?

You can be careful and a mistake can happen. (I don’t want to admit I wasn’t careful.)

A mistake?

Forget to take your pill or a hole in the condom or the diaphragm slips.

All that equipment to not be a mother…

Not be a mother yet.

So there was a time when you wanted to be one?

To be a mother was what a girl wanted then, and I did not. Once, years later, when I stroked a baby’s skin and leaned in to smell, I wanted a child, but the physical desire entered my body only once—with the man I met when I slipped on the ice. Soon, friends started to have babies, and my sisters. By the time I was in my forties, I had learned to say, What a beautiful baby! By my sixties I meant it.

Once when I was making love with another woman…

You had lovers who were women?

Yes, for more than a decade. Anyway, once when I was making love with another woman, she touched me between my legs, and suddenly, as if my mother were touching me there, I was an infant.

After the abortion, I returned to the theatre in the Berkshires for a second summer.

The first summer, I was thrilled just to get an interview; in preparation, I asked a New York director who taught at the school about the producer. She’s a dyke who’s had a bad season, he said, which scared me, as it was meant to. I was apprehensive as I entered the elevator to her office above the Palace Theatre on Broadway, the waiting room out of a scene from a Rosalind Russell movie (His Girl Friday, 1940).

The producer was a woman my mother’s age with a round face and gray hair cut to her chin; listening, she had the sharp attentiveness of a bird, moving her head in little adjustments as you see them do through binoculars. I liked her. She asked me to call her on my way back to New Haven. I stopped at a phone booth on the Merritt Parkway: I’ll hire you, she said. Make me proud.

Pictures and features on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times, headlines in the Berkshire Eagle—I did what I’d learned in publicity class. In November, after that first summer, the producer took me out for a drink at the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis, martinis and the Maxfield Parrish mural. The board had threatened to fire her because I overspent on ads by thousands of dollars. She found a way to pay off the debt and talked them into rehiring me. Make me proud, she said again. No one had told me there was a budget or how much it was, and no one was paying attention. I was so ashamed.

It’s May, just weeks after the abortion, layout for the theatre brochure is due, and I am afraid of the budget constraints. I hire a friend from the design school instead of the glitzy New York designer; the brochure will have text rather than photographs, cheaper to print. Yellow with red letters. The season is complicated, I say, explaining my idea to the producer. The plays require thought: one is by Eugène Ionesco (1909–1994), who will visit from Paris—how to frame a three-act called Hunger and Thirst as summer entertainment.

That term, I had been taking a writing class. The dean, when he visits the class, is startled by my presence, the only female in the room and not a writing student: What are you doing here?

My first essay was an account of Aretha Franklin at the New Haven Arena—concert as theatre: You make me feel like a natural woman; just three years older than me, she compels an orchestra, holds an audience of four thousand. When I search for information about that concert, a ticket flashes on my phone’s screen. Flesh pink, January 31, 1969. In just under three months, I’d have the abortion.

Three months after the abortion, a group photograph taken on a porch, the young woman at the center wears a checked minidress, legs crossed, hair pulled back, radiant smile, her housemates around her, Daniel, Jan and his rock band, long haired, in the custom of that summer of moon shot and Woodstock. Enough room in the big gray house, twenty minutes from the theatre, with a barn where the band wrote and rehearsed in the spirit of Music from Big Pink (the Band, 1968).

All summer, the young woman drove the blue Corvair up the valley to work and when she came home she cooked, secluded herself in her bedroom, read, and sometimes wrote. She worked hard at the theatre, invited the press to meet Eugène Ionesco for tea on the porch of a Victorian hotel and drove him all the way to Boston for a TV interview.

And then, she’s standing in the bedroom with L, gesturing toward the shelf of radical books. A week after he leaves comes Hurricane Camille, 259 dead, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. She writes a poem in which she is Camille, destroyed coast, all the houses lost, people wandering ruins looking for one another.

Was this how a self felt?

The band is smoking pot, fumes through the house; she gives a big party and red wine stains the carpet.

I didn’t think about I’m having an abortion, I just did it. Blasted through fear: I want this life, not that life.

In the dog days of August, she asks the producer if she can leave her job early: I’m having a nervous breakdown, she says. The producer is paying attention. She sends the lonely young woman to a psychiatrist at the local sanitarium, a very nice man. Did she mention that she was dropping out of the school? That she wanted to write? Had she told her parents?

She goes to the Adirondacks to take refuge with her family and learns of her mother’s dissatisfaction, a rift in her parents’ marriage. She is angry at her mother, worried for her father, who had been taken by surprise. She is taken by surprise. She had thought she had a perfect family. She had thought she was moving to Chicago to live with L, but when she finally reached him by phone, he told her he didn’t want her to come. She moved alone to New York City.

I didn’t think about I’m having an abortion, I just did it. Blasted through fear: I want this life, not that life. Rabbit test, rabbits leaping, more and more of them. The Friedman test was developed in 1931 to detect pregnancy. A woman’s urine is injected into an immature female rabbit; after a few days, the animal is dissected; if her ovaries are enlarged, the woman is pregnant. Whatever the case, the rabbit dies.

Once in Wyoming, a small rabbit at the door: Muffy! The next day, two. Muffy and Buffy. The next day, three. Muffy, Buffy, Tuffy. This went on until I came to the end of the alphabet, a multitude of rabbits at my doorstep—they delighted me. Autumn that year / Was a rabbit affair: Velimir Khlebnikov (Russian, 1885–1922). There are rogue years when rabbits reproduce in multitudes.

My great teacher, the assistant manager of the Metropolitan Opera, called me into his Lincoln Center office. If you want to write, he said, quit the drama school and go into psychotherapy. Something about me, he seemed to be saying, more serious than the doctor with toys in his office.

I was stunned that this man with a heavy Brooklyn accent who told stories about opera divas and orchestra strikes had actually summoned me to Manhattan to advise me on my life.

I think of certain women, often very accomplished, maybe with one or two children, who cook for a dozen effortlessly. Pasta. Salad. Then back to her studio in the afternoon. I first did amatriciana, then plain with garlic and oil, often with very thin slices of hot pepper. At an artists’ colony in Umbria, eating supper under an arbor, I imagine myself that kind of woman.

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